In a recent review for Amazon, Dr. William Johnson wrote: “Toward a Socially Responsible Psychology for a Global Era presents a much-needed integration of many dimensions in the human experience, which is lacking in many contemporary approaches to psychology. Arguing against fragmented models of the individualistic self, the authors in this work seek to illumine the profound extent to which individual health and global well-being are profoundly connected.”

In a review for PsycCritiques, Dr. Jeffrey Rubin wrote: “Toward a Socially Responsible Psychology for a Global Era is an important book with a crucial message delivered in a clear and accessible style. The authors share an exemplary passion for, and commitment to, an extraordinarily important mission: using Western psychology to create a more sustainable future.” The volume “presents a compelling argument that Western psychology as a discipline in general and psychologists in particular have done a better job of elucidating the individual sources of anxiety and guilt, depression, and despair than they have in clarifying the structural and systematic sources of human exploitation, oppression, and suffering. The authors maintain that the individualistic focus of Western psychology is all too often complicit in the problems that it attempts to address because it tends to omit—and thus doesn’t question or challenge—the harmful impact of the sociocultural and socioeconomic forces that have deeply shaped, if not co-created, the very problems that afflict individuals seek mental health services to remedy, including sexism, racism, and poverty. “The root causes of many seemingly individual symptoms—loneliness, isolation, alienation, anxiety, anomie, low self-esteem, depression, relationship distress, addictions, violence, attention deficit disorders, eating disorders,” note Mustakova-Possardt and Woodall, “are at least partly influenced by the beliefs, behaviors, and lifestyles generated by the assumptions and values of global capitalism, crude materialism, consumerism, greed, commodification, wealth distribution inequities, and labor exploitation” (p. 91). The authors not only diagnose what is wrong, they also recommend changes that are needed in terms of vision, training, research, theory, and clinical practice.”

In another recent review for Journal of Moral Education, Dr. Rhett Diessner wrote: “Chapters emphasize the importance of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the Earth Charter as the two “key documents that provide the ethical underpinnings and guiding moral vision” (p. 8) for developing a socially responsible psychology in the global era. I cannot think of two better secular statements for guiding humanity toward a unity-in-diversity approach to creating a sustainable and healthy world.”

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